I am a current-affairs columnist and film critic for The New York Post, for which I have covered everything from political conventions to film festivals. I have also contributed reviews and essays to The Wall Street Journal. Follow me on Twitter: @rkylesmith.

You Won't Believe The Stupidity Of The Latest Attack On Walmart

If you thought Mayor Bloomberg’s failed assault on certain large sodas sold in certain kinds of stores was arbitrary and capricious, get ready for a similarly bizarre attempt to punish large retailers.

The latest foolish attack on Walmart is happening, fittingly, in a committee hearing in Washington, D.C., a town that is reminding us all how it is even more obtuse on the local level than on the national. The salvo is called the Large Retailer Accountability Act (LRAA), but just think of it as yet another effort from the DGDP: the Department of Good Deeds Punishment.

For its sin of providing millions of working class Americans with good service, broad selection and low prices, Walmart might as well have painted a (Target-style) bullseye on itself among progressives. Walmart is at last preparing to enter the nation’s capital, with plans well underway for six stores in the District, two of them set to open this year.

Away from the tourist trail, the District still contains some blighted neighborhoods where crime and disorder discourage business and leave residents starved for corporate attention. Walmart has eagerly been reviving desolate corners of the city.

In order to punish this good deed, though, the rebarbative chairman of the D.C. City Council, Phil Mendelson, has been pushing an extraordinary new law that would apply only to large national retailers, with more than $1 billion in sales, who open D.C. stores of greater than 75,000 square feet. Such firms would be required to pay a “living wage” of at least $11.75 an hour to all employees — a 62 percent premium over the federal minimum wage. D.C. already has its own super-minimum wage of $8.25 an hour (set by law at $1 above the federal minimum). So the LRAA is a super-duper minimum wage proposed mainly to punish a single company, which is why wags in the press are calling it the Walmart Living Wage Bill.

You may well ask why Walmart allowed the matter to get this far: When it comes to breaking into northern urban markets, can’t one of America’s largest and greatest companies steamroll a few local-yokel pols? Can’t it grease the right palms? The question is a sad one that presupposes that an honest business must roll up its sleeves and master the kind of dark arts we associate with corruption-riddled Russia or China.

And the answer is: Walmart is way ahead of you. In its D.C. push, which has been underway since at least 2002, Walmart has thoughtfully gone around making the kinds of “donations” to politically-connected figures that wedding guests gave the Corleone family. It put on its payroll the treasurer and campaign manager of a key city council member, Yvette Alexander. It invited neighborhood activists to a focus group that paid $100 and dinner. It spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on local charities like the Greater Washington Urban League and D.C. Hunger Solutions. It arranged a healthy-foods photo-op with Michelle Obama. And it spent in the “eight-figure range” (in the estimate of one journalist) to sponsor a traveling exhibition on the African-American experience that was led by NPR host Tavis Smiley, who proceeded to praise Walmart at the swanky opening-night party amid many influential black leaders. Walmart brass also attended the party, where they availed themselves of the opportunity to announce a gift of 19,000 free tickets to the exhibition to D.C.’s schoolchildren.

You’d think a business that not only plays by the rules (without asking for tax and zoning breaks) but is a beloved icon for the working class and goes to considerable lengths to be a good corporate citizen would be welcomed at least as warmly as, say, a heavily-subsidized sports stadium catering mainly to suburbanites and the well-off. But nevertheless, Mendelson and 11 other members of the City Council arranged for the D.C. City Council’s Committee on Business, Consumer and Regulatory Affairs to meet on March 20 to discuss, banana-republic-style, socking Walmart with the super-duper minimum wage that would inevitably benefit a few at the expense of higher prices for the many.

Committee Chairman Vincent Orange feigned surprise that Walmart didn’t show up to be showered with invective from a restive crowd stocked with labor shills (unionized businesses would be exempt from the law) and other activists: “It’s to Walmart’s detriment for them not to be here, to put on the record themselves and make their case,” he said, forebodingly.

Despite the immense publicity value of phony outrage, and despite D.C.’s place (no. 51 out of 51) on the Chamber of Commerce’s list of the most business-friendly states, Walmart is still favored to prevail in the latest fight: Similar bills were defeated three times since 2005.

And even in statist D.C., there is recognition that an efficient free market, unlike the city’s sclerotic bureaucracies, is a near-miraculous method for lifting people up. “We’ve been praying for food in this neighborhood for about 40 years,” church board member Yvonne Williams told Washington City Paper when Walmart announced its plans to establish an outpost on a parcel of land at New Jersey Avenue and H Street NW that has been vacant since 1990. “God has brought what was supposed to be here—a first-class, progressive thing.”

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That’s how a socialist government works nowadays: 1. Destroy private business with taxes and regulations 2. Make government intervention (subsidies, stimuli, etc.) indispensable to bring back the jobs lost by the near demise of business 3. When the business becomes addicted to government subsidies, it the facto becomes a government-owned business 4. When all the formerly privately owned means of production are chained to the government, voila’, socialism!

would it matter which store came to town ? walmart didn’t set minimum hourly amount and they do have town hall meetings to let everyone that wants to say something a chance to voice their opinion on whether to come to town or not!

This is an example of why the American People need to renew their early Republic way of keeping on the take political thugs in their place. Tar and Feather or just plain hanging. Mendeleson and Orange, would be a good place to start and might be all that was needed to get some sense into the Elite Ruling Criminal Class.

And I guarantee you that those next two businesses pay much, much higher standard wages to their employees and do not screw them on every occasion they have a chance to. Walmart forces people to shop there by driving competition out of town, limiting options and stifling economic growth. They then pay their workers minimum wage (or lower if they can) while making sure they never work full time long enough (40 hours one week, 39 the next, 24 the next, back to 40) to be able to apply for actual benefits so that their workers are forced to shop there because they abuse Chinese workers to make their products cheap and shoddily. So with that look, they really don’t pay their workers at all. They get their paycheck and are forced to spend it at Walmart in order to survive because that is the best place to get the bang for their buck. Walmart is a pathetic business and it encompasses the epitome of capitalist corruption. True capitalism should be fair and promote economic growth while encouraging competition, even amongst the small business, local mom and pop stores. Walmart is a sham.

I can’t find the part, which I’m sure is here, i mean based on this propaganda it would have to be here. Does anyone else see the “Sponsored by Walmart” in this ludicrous piece of garbage? To say that a company that posts multibillion dollar revenue shouldn’t being paying above an inadequate minimum wage is socially and morally ignorant. The word “hack” comes to mind. Shame on you.